Former Kaneko Kentaro Hayama Villa, Beijuso

A House Named for an Eighty-Eighth Year

Kyu Kaneko Kentaro Hayama Bettei Beijuso (旧金子堅太郎葉山別邸米寿荘, also written Beijusō) is a two-storey wooden house of about 1940 at Isshiki in Hayama, Kanagawa Prefecture, entered on Japan's National Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 4 February 2021. It stands immediately beside Onshi Matsuso, the earlier Kaneko villa, on the same wooded slope above Isshiki beach.

The name fixes its date. Beiju (米寿) is the Japanese celebration of an eighty-eighth year, so called because the character for rice, 米, can be read as the figures eight, ten and eight stacked together. Kaneko Kentaro was born in early 1853, which put him in his eighty-eighth year by the traditional count in 1940. A plaque reading Beijuso in his own calligraphy survives, and the town's cultural properties office treats it as the best evidence for the building date.

He built it for his second wife. It was the last house he made, and he died two years later at 89.

A Farmhouse Below, a Tea House Above

The building covers 169 square metres under a hip-and-gable roof of pantiles. Enter the front door and you find the ground floor laid out as a ta-no-ji four-room plan, four tatami rooms in a two-by-two grid named after the character 田, with a dining room attached at the back as a separate volume. Four more rooms sit above.

What makes the interior worth the registration is that the two floors argue with each other.

The ground floor is farmhouse. Local accounts hold that its timbers came from a dismantled townhouse or farmhouse in Kyoto, and the plan follows minka practice rather than villa practice. Heavy beams are left visible with a ceiling set above them, sashi-kamoi lintels run deep and thick through the openings, and the fittings are built with a solidity no summer villa needs. Yet the rooms are not crude. Each of the four differs slightly from its neighbours in detailing, which turns a plain vernacular plan into something calm and rather refined.

Climb the stairs and the vocabulary changes completely. The upper floor is sukiya, the tea-influenced manner, worked in meiboku, choice figured timbers selected for grain. Slender members replace heavy ones. The contrast is deliberate and is exactly what the registration file singles out.

Adding to the mixture, the second-floor material is said to have been salvaged from a neighbouring villa that had belonged to Ogura Fusazo. A house assembled from other houses, in other words, on two floors that were never meant to match.

Why a Statesman Wanted a Farmhouse

Reusing old rural buildings was fashionable among wealthy Japanese in the 1920s and 1930s. Part of the impulse came from the mingei movement, which argued that the anonymous crafts and dwellings of ordinary people held an honesty that studio work had lost. Part of it was simply that dismantling and re-erecting a timber frame is straightforward when the joinery is pegged rather than nailed.

Kaneko had an example next door. The adjoining Hayama villa of Dan Takuma contained a farmhouse brought from Iriuda near Odawara and reworked by the architect Ogi Rodo, a specialist in tea architecture. Dan came from the same Fukuoka domain as Kaneko, studied in the United States at the same period, and later became his brother-in-law. The two remained close for life until Dan was assassinated in 1932. Hayama town's assessment allows that Beijuso may owe a good deal to that neighbouring house.

Read that way, the building is less a curiosity than a document of taste. A man who had drafted a constitution, run two ministries and argued Japan's case to an American president spent his final years in a rebuilt farmer's house, with a tea room over his head.

Registration and What It Records

Beijuso carries registration number 14-0290 and came through in the 97th round of registrations, notified and entered on 4 February 2021, the same day as Onshi Matsuso. The criterion applied was that the building is a model of its type in design.

Registration is not the same as designation. A Registered Tangible Cultural Property, a category created in 1996, is a building generally fifty years old or more whose value is recorded in a national register; the owner notifies the authorities before substantial alteration but is otherwise free to keep using it. Designation as an Important Cultural Property is a far heavier instrument applied to a much smaller number of buildings. Beijuso is registered, not designated.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs places the house east of Onshi Matsuso, while Hayama town's own account describes Kaneko building it on the north side. The two properties are close neighbours on the same hillside and the discrepancy concerns wording rather than identification, but readers consulting both sources should be aware of it.

The value argued for the building is twofold: its place in the history of villa culture in Hayama and along the wider Shonan coast, and the way its two contrasting floors reflect the taste of the early Showa years. When the pair were registered, the owner of Onshi Matsuso told a local paper that registration was a way of asking future owners to keep the buildings where they stand.

The Slope Today

Beijuso is not open to the public. Hayama town states this directly. There are no opening hours, no admission charge and no interior visits; the house is held by a private corporate owner and stands on private ground screened by trees. Visitors should not attempt to enter or photograph within the site.

The public parts of the neighbourhood repay a walk. Hayama Shiosai Park occupies the former imperial annexe, which was built on the plot Kaneko vacated in 1919; the annexe's carriage porch survives as the entrance to the park museum. The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama is at Isshiki 2208-1, with free outdoor sculpture and a sea-facing restaurant. The Yamaguchi Hoshun Memorial Hall at Isshiki 2320, once the home and studio of a Japanese-style painter, sits almost against the Kaneko plots and shows what a Hayama villa interior of this period feels like from inside.

Behind everything rises Mitsugaoka, laced with short walking trails that reach a view over Sagami Bay to Enoshima and, on clear winter mornings, Mount Fuji.

Getting there means a bus. From JR Zushi station (east exit, stand 3) or Keikyu Zushi-Hayama station (south exit, stand 2), take Keikyu bus route Zu-11 or Zu-12 marked kaigan-mawari and alight at Mikagaoka / Kanagawa Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan-mae, about fifteen to twenty minutes, longer on summer weekends. Note that the Hayama Imperial Villa a short way along the shore prohibits photography entirely, and guards enforce it at the gate.